This blog has moved to its own domain. Please visit IndiaUncut.com for the all-new India
Uncut and bookmark it. The new site has much more content and some new sections, and you can read about them here and here. You can subscribe to full RSS feeds of all the sections from here.
This blogspot site will no longer be updated, except in case of emergencies, if the main site suffers a prolonged outage. Thanks - Amit.

Friday, June 23, 2006

Guilty Pleasures 3 -- Hunger Strike by Temple of the Dog

If I ever compiled a soundtrack for my college years, this song would be one of the first I'd pick. Temple of the Dog came about when a bunch of guys came together in Seattle to write and release a tribute to Andrew Wood, the lead singer of a band called Mother Love Bone, who died of a heroin overdose in 1990. His bandmates from MLB, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, joined Chris Cornell, Wood's one-time room-mate, along with Matt Cameron on drums. Grunge hadn't broken into the mainstream yet, but soon all these men would become household names: Cornell and Cameron were part of Soundgarden, while Gossard and Ament would go on to form Pearl Jam.

Eddie Vedder had flown down to Seattle to audition for Pearl Jam, and sang on a couple of tracks on the eponymous album, including Hunger Strike. I first heard this song months after it came out, when I'd already gotten into Pearl Jam and Soundgarden: what a thrill it was to listen to Cornell and Vedder sing on the same track! And how perfectly structured this was as a rock song! I didn't care much for the lyrics, but that hardly mattered.